"The Chinese infidels eat the flesh of swine and
dogs," observed the roving Moroccan, who in
China never felt so farfrom home. Cats, dogs,
pigs, and turtles await buyers at the bustling
Qingping market in Guangzhou, the southern
Chinese city Ibn Battuta visited in 1346.
"a humble-hearted man who walks on foot to
the Friday prayer. His subjects ... take a
pleasure in warring for the Faith. .. . They
have the upper hand over all the infidels in
their vicinity."
Indeed. The traveler could hardly have
imagined that the new religion would spread
across Sumatra and the whole archipelago to
define Indonesia, the world's most populous
Islamic country, with 160 million Muslims.
When I set out for Samudra-deserted
now, save for a few fishermen-I had diffi
culty finding a traveling companion. The
town lies in Aceh, one of Indonesia's richest
provinces, producing 75 percent of its oil and
gas, but also its most militantly orthodox.
The central government has been trying to
settle farmers from crowded Java in Aceh,
but local Muslim fundamentalists have killed
some 200 of the homesteaders. Five minutes
into the province our car was delayed while
soldiers removed another body from the road.
"We northerners have a reputation for
fierce independence," a native of Aceh told
me. "We fought the Dutch colonizers for 47
years, then Japanese occupiers. They even
tried to force us to pray toward Tokyo instead
of Mecca," he said with disgust. "Like
many, I took to the hills to fight." He has the
scars to prove it.
I could not follow Ibn Battuta to "Mul
Jawa," a land scholars have yet to pinpoint,
nor to the port of Tawalisi -not found on any
map, old or new. There he rowed ashore to
meet an Amazon princess who led an army
of slave-girl warriors "who fight like men."
She presented him gifts of lemons, rice, pep
per, and two buffalo to stock his ship.
Cathay at Quanzhou on the southeast
ern coast of China, just across the
strait from Taiwan. Here, where Chi
na established its first foreign-trade enclave,
the great "silk road of the sea" began. The
port impressed him as "one of the largest. I
saw in it about a hundred large junks."
From an ancient stone lighthouse I saw
only a few fishing smacks and a rusty coastal
freighter in the once bustling harbor. Ashore,
I noticed that many of Quanzhou's Muslims
still cling to their old quarter on Tumen
Street around the Qingjing Mosque.
"Ours is China's first mosque, already 350
years old when Ibn Battuta prayed here,"
said the imam, Abdola Huang Qiu Run, as
we sipped tea under the pagoda-like roof of
his office. A motto in flowing Chinese callig
raphy over his door read "Tu Yi Zhen Zhu"
which roughly translates, "There is no God
but Allah."
Even in Ibn Battuta, a man who had seen
the world, this land struck wonder: "China
is the safest and best regulated of countries
for a traveler," he writes. "A man may go by
NationalGeographic, December 1991